AndBeauty e-commerce platform

Services:

• Software development
• Customer support
• Maintenance

Technologies: PHP, TypeScript, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis

Integrations: ESTO, Klaviyo, Directo, Modena Buyplan

Goal:

The biggest challenge AndBeauty faced was their existing e-commerce platform, which lacked functions and had inadequate customer service. They needed a more versatile, user-friendly and reliable solution to accommodate a growing portfolio of brands and products, especially since their goal was to become a leading beauty e-commerce platform in Estonia. A website audit carried out together with Opus revealed that it wasn’t feasible to build new solutions on the old foundation, and that it would have been too costly. Therefore, Opus and AndBeauty decided to build a completely new online store from scratch. The Opus team assisted AndBeauty in planning several steps in advance. Magento was developed further to meet the client’s needs, the Esto payment method was added to Modena’s payment solution, and processes and maintenance were simplified to reduce manual work. The old online store was supported simultaneously with the development of the new website to ensure its continued operation and sales.

Objectives:

• Implement automated solutions to simplify processes and reduce manual work, for example, when uploading products.
• Create a multilingual online store that is user-friendly and functional.
• Build an online store capable of accommodating product portfolio growth and withstanding big campaigns, such as E-Monday.
• Meet the WCAG-based requirements of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) by 2025, so the website is accessible to all users, including people with special needs.

Opus’s solutions:

• We automated the upload of products with variations. Previously, Magento’s parent products and their variations had to be put together manually; now a product appears in the online store with just a few clicks.
• We built a new online store on Magento that lets the store grow, is scalable and can be extended for special requirements.
• We improved ease of use and created as smooth a customer journey as possible.

Client feedback:

“We really liked how Opus organised the work process. The weekly meetings held from the very start of our cooperation kept everyone up to date with the processes and updates. Communication was fast and efficient – someone was always just a call or an email away. And we weren’t left alone with our concerns and questions after the online store was handed over, either. Aftercare and support were just as important to us as building the online store, to help us reach our goal of growing into one of the largest online department stores in Estonia.”
Stiina Klementsov, Head of Development and Marketing, AndBeauty online department store

From a small family business to one of the largest beauty online stores in Estonia

AndBeauty is an Estonian family business with a passion for the beauty industry. A company that began 15 years ago importing just one brand now represents over 25 brands, serving private customers, beauty salons and online shoppers. As for many other companies, the COVID-19 pandemic gave AndBeauty a significant boost. As a result of all the restrictions and closures during that time, bringing stores online was the only way to save their business. Fortunately, AndBeauty had opened its online store just before the crisis, but strategic decisions were needed during the pandemic. Besides importing several beauty brands, they also started focusing on reselling. Currently, their primary focus is the development and growth of the e-commerce platform. They already offer a selection of over 300 beauty brands, and this number continues to grow. Therefore, they needed to plan several steps ahead because their ambitions are high – to become one of the largest beauty e-commerce platforms in Estonia.

To achieve this goal, they needed to find a technical partner to take care of the technical side of things so they could focus on business growth. They did not want to invest heavily in an online store that could be written off a few years later if it were not continuously developed and maintained. It was crucial that the platform on which the new store was built be scalable, sustainable, and have a large developer community to ensure ongoing support and continuous improvement. Opus has over 7 years of experience in developing Magento e-commerce platforms, and it’s in their DNA to provide a support team, so trust was quickly established and collaboration began.

Opus adopted a systematic approach to help AndBeauty achieve its goals. The process involved careful analysis, prototyping, development, testing, and maintenance to get the new customer solution up and running as quickly as possible. Opus prioritised the client’s ability to quickly recoup their investments to avoid too much simultaneous spending. While the new site was being built, the old online store had to be maintained and kept operational to ensure its functionality.

Simplifying e-commerce maintenance processes and enhancing user experience

One of the biggest challenges AndBeauty faced was making their e-commerce website trilingual. It was assumed that managing and configuring products in three languages across multiple pages would be incredibly complex and require a lot of work. According to Opus’s project manager Tanel Särgava, this is unfortunately the case for many online stores, because product information can be uploaded in a way that is not quite correct for Directo and many other ERP systems. The information is not comprehensive and doesn’t get published on the e-commerce platform because crucial fields and links are missing on the product card. As a result, it was challenging to understand where and why specific problems existed. Fortunately, Opus had previous experience with Directo and knew how to address this issue. For instance, AndBeauty’s e-commerce store had an incomplete solution for variation products, and they had to manually assemble parent products and their variations on the Magento side. Automating this process made products visible in the online store with just a few clicks.

According to AndBeauty’s marketing manager, fixing the backend and automating processes saved employees a significant amount of time. Previously, uploading a single product took more than ten minutes, but today she estimates it takes about a minute.

Opus also thought ahead about the online store’s user experience. Optimising checkout processes improved the convenience and speed of the customer journey. Opus’s experience has shown that customers are often discouraged by unnecessary steps, buttons, and overly long checkout processes. Checkout should be as simple and quick as possible. Each step in the checkout should be a separate action to avoid overloading the user with unnecessary data fields. In addition, options to leave the checkout process should be limited by removing links that take the user out of the checkout view.

Opus also planned ahead for the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which took effect in 2025 and builds on WCAG. Its requirements mandate that all e-commerce stores and websites must address user experience and design in a way that makes information accessible to all users, including people with special needs. This includes disabilities such as blindness and visual impairment, deafness and hearing impairment, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, physical disabilities, speech impairments, sensitivity to light, and combinations of these disabilities. Complying with these guidelines often makes web content more user-friendly in general.

Campaign-based business model

According to Stiina Klementsov, the marketing manager at AndBeauty, their online store operates on a campaign-based business model, especially now when pricing sells. Therefore, it’s extremely important for them that setting up campaigns, adding new product groups, changing prices, adding discount solutions, and other related processes occur as smoothly as possible, and that the online store can withstand large campaigns like E-Monday. In the past, the online store was often down, and it was challenging to fix errors. Today, changes and improvements are made in a way that customers don’t even notice. Opus’s support team assists with various configurations and provides guidance on how to run campaigns.

Among the developments to better manage campaigns was integration with the email marketing platform Klaviyo. This email solution is one of the most comprehensive on the market and is particularly suitable for e-commerce because it offers a wide range of features to grow e-business. When it is used correctly – creating various segments and automated email flows, collecting leads and more – the online store’s growth potential is significant.

What’s next?

According to Klementsov, the majority of their requests and developments have been implemented. The online store’s share of the company’s total revenue has grown and now stands at about 25%. The goal for the new year is to focus on analytics and gather feedback on the customer experience. For example, Opus suggested that when a customer returns to the store from the bank, a small two-part form appears where they can rate their shopping experience and add a comment.

Särgava points out that analytics and feedback from an end-user perspective are areas that e-commerce stores often neglect or simply don’t know how to use. Yet this is essential information: it is usually through customers that you find out what is wrong with an online store. The question is how to obtain this information from customers. This can be accomplished by using tools such as Klaviyo, which offer customised questionnaires, reminder emails, and other features. Särgava’s experience dispels the myth that Estonians are unwilling to provide feedback.